I've seen a couple more things, although most of these were yesterday. Today was spent catching up with a friend of mine, first going to the shooting range (the first time in quite awhile for me) and then checking out a new BBQ place that has been well received even outside of Richmond.

Anyway, on to the show.

1898, Los últimos de Filipinas (Netflix has it as 1898, Our Last Men in the Philippines). It's an interesting story, about a small group of Spanish soldiers who hold out in a small village in the Philippines in 1898-99 and refuse to surrender to the native forces, or to believe that Spain has ceded the islands to the United States. The real story is a fascinating one, the movie largely is not. It was supposedly considered as Spain's possible submission to the Oscars, but I can see why they didn't ultimately go with it. It's mostly about sitting and waiting, since they are under siege after all. You can make a good story about anything, but this isn't one of those cases: it manages to make what should be an exciting event feel reaaaaly boring. There doesn't really seem to be an attempt to find the people in all this, it's just a lot of nothing happening, plus disease and occasional violence. The Siege of Jadotville is also on Netflix and is better in every way.

Good Kill. Since I'm apparently on an Ethan Hawke kick, I decided to give this one a shot. Hawke plays an Air Force pilot who's gone from F-16s to Predator drones, and is having a hard time. He goes to work on an Air Force base near Las Vegas, where he sits in a trailer with a joystick and a computer monitor that lets him blow people up on the other side of the world. He'd done several combat tours in actual jets, and it's interesting how the film explores his wishes to go back there. It's a little heavy-handed in places, or at least has characters outright say what they're thinking more than I'd like. But it's never awkward per se, since it's always in the context of people interacting with each other in a way that feels natural enough. Hawke's character's steady decline is also not overplayed, and his wife (January Jones) is a really well-done character: a former chorus girl who hasn't quite decided if she wants this whole "adulthood" thing, but isn't a shrew. She still loves her husband, and genuinely tries to understand what's going on. The movie does somewhat overplay the moral ambiguities, but it also shows an interesting idea of what "good" and "just" mean in the context of war overall.

While not a movie, I did watch the first episode of Nobel, a Norwegian series about a special forces soldier who comes back from Afghanistan and still has some work to do for the gummint. Seems to be more going the generic spy show way, but being set and done someewhere other than the U.S. makes it at least a little different.